The Foreign Service Journal, September 2007

out something truthful. Does that justify dispensing with basic rights? Hardly. Experts on cracking secretive crim- inal conspiracies report that the interrogation room is a far less important source of useful information than tips and leads from the general public — a neighbor or acquaintance who notices suspicious activity and reports it to the police. For example, it was not rough interroga- tion techniques but tips from members of the public in August 2006 that helped foil the plot to bomb trans- Atlantic flights from Heathrow, that led to the arrest of the July 21, 2005, London bombers, and that disclosed to the CIA the location of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s safe house in Karachi. (Cell phones and computers seized at the time of arrest have also been treasure troves of information, helping, for example, to crack open the 1995 “Bojinka” plot to blow up airplanes over the Pacific and to reveal the identity of alleged conspirators behind the attempted London and Glasgow bombings in June.) So, what if the Bush administration’s lawless approach to counterterrorism makes people less likely to cooperate with law-enforcement efforts? What if people, out of dis- taste for the administration’s methods, choose to close their eyes to suspicious activity rather than become com- plicit in dirty-war techniques? Not everyone will react that way, but anyone who does represents a cost to abusive counterterrorismmethods — one we can expect to rise the more closely a community identifies with the suspect facing abuse. Because those who are most likely to feel that way are individuals from the same community as the terrorist, the administration’s use of abusive techniques is arguably diminishing the most important source of information there is about potential future violent acts. Dealing with the “Swing Vote” And what about the root causes of terrorism? It is widely recognized that curbing it requires not only smart law enforcement but also effective efforts to address the conditions that drive people to violence. There is much F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29